Friday the 13th Redux
by trickortreater
Summary: After losing four children to stillbirth, a woman finally delivers a healthy baby and names him Jason. For one quiet lakeside community, his birth marks the beginning of apocalyptic horror. First, his mother descends into madness. Then he himself grows up to become a juggernaut of legendary brutality.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The storm railed with blasting winds and thunder, as if Nature herself protested the coming of the aberration. The hospital staff was lean tonight. Day shift nurses and doctors remained to fill in for employees who failed to show up for work. It was shaping up to be a busy night. The ER was full of road accident victims, and on the second floor, a woman had arrived in labor.

Amidst intermittent shouts of thunder, large hail battered the roof like pummeling fists. The woman, reclined in a hospital bed with her legs hoisted by stirrups, raised her face to the heavens and screamed back defiantly. There was pain, but she was tough and determined. She was also desperate. The last four had been born dead. She pleaded with God to preserve this one's life.

In the first floor lobby, her husband sat crumpled and drunk in a waiting room chair. He had almost killed them on the way to the hospital, when the sheets of rain were so dense that he could hardly see the lane dividers painted on the highway. The prospect of driving home made him reach for the silver flask tucked inside the inner pocket of his jacket, which was still heavy with the soak of rain. The receptionist had given up telling him he couldn't drink on the premises.

Back on the second floor, an obstetrician coached the woman to _push, push, push _as the delivery was nearing an end.

"Again, Pamela. One more time. Again. Very good. Almost out."

She felt her womb release the baby completely, and upon hearing that the infant was silent, she began to sob.

"No," she whispered, her voice ravished.

The doctor laughed. She looked at him, anger slowly displacing grief.

"My baby's dead. Why are you laughing?"

"No, Pamela. It's alive. It's a boy, and he's alive."

She was stunned.

"What? Why isn't he crying?"

"I've only seen it a handful of times in all these years. It's rare, but sometimes they come out just so calm and quiet."

"But he's alive? My baby is alive?"

"Oh my, yes," the doctor said, again laughing.

He handed the bloody infant to a nurse. The nurse's smile faltered when she looked into its face.

Pamela stretched out her arms.

"Give him to me. Please, let me hold him."

"Let's get him washed up first," the doctor said.

When the baby was clean and swaddled in its mothers arms, the doctor sat next to her bed and spoke.

"As we discussed before, the chances of birth defects increase dramatically as women approach forty. There are some anomalies in the facial features, but I wouldn't worry yet. It's early, and sometimes these things have a tendency to, well..." He interwove the fingers of his hands together. "Kind of come together as the baby grows."

Pamela did not appear to be listening. She was rapt in the tiny, warm body pressed close to her breasts. Her eyes were red, tired, yet filled with unmistakable joy. They never parted from the sleeping infant. She spoke softly to it.

"He lives. My sweet boy. Jason lives."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

The storm retreated. Distant now. Skeletal shapes of light dancing on the horizon. The night was calm as Bud Keller drove his wife and newborn son home on roads strewn with leaves and broken tree limbs. Every now and then, he shifted his eyes from road to the strange visage tucked in soft blankets. His hands unconsciously moved with them, and when he turned his attention to the road again, the headlights were drifting into the trees. He jerked the wheel to the left. Bodies shifted in their seats. He expected his wife to chide him for poor driving or being drunk or both, but she regarded neither.

"What the hell's wrong with its face?" he finally asked.

Pamela's radiant expression shone down on the baby, and he felt a twinge of annoyance that he probably couldn't say anything to spoil her happiness.

"There's nothing wrong with this face," she marveled. "He's just fine."

Bud navigated the truck too fast into the driveway. He had to swerve to avoid crushing his aluminum fishing boat, which had been blown off the concrete blocks that supported it next to the house. It was almost one o'clock in the morning.

There was no crib in which to lay the infant. One had been purchased many years ago, but after putting it together and taking it apart on four separate occasions, Bud had left the pieces stacked against a closet wall.

"What's the point?" he had told his pregnant wife earlier that week.

He would be damned if he was going to put it together tonight. It was late, and he was all thumbs with that kind of stuff anyway.

Pamela fell into their bed with the baby next to her, and now he cursed himself for not piecing together the crib. Now, he would have to listen to it cry right into his ear all night. But the baby didn't cry at all. Not that night and not after. And then _that _became a source of irritation for him. Didn't normal babies cry a lot? What was wrong with the thing?

At his insistence, Pamela made an appointment with a pediatrician the following week. The doctor performed a thorough physical examination but could find nothing wrong with the baby.

"The lack of crying is unusual, yes," he said, "but he appears to be fine. Very healthy, in fact. His response to aural stimulation is perfectly normal. Nothing wrong with his vocal chords, but you probably knew that already. He coos just like any healthy baby."

As the doctor bid her good-bye, he commented with a grin, "I wouldn't worry. In fact, you might consider it a stroke of fortune. You know, most parents would envy you your restful nights."

Pamela rarely slept through the night, however, as she found herself constantly rousing from sleep to check on silent Jason in his crib. One night, Bud awoke to the sound of her coming back to bed.

"What are you doing?" he croaked.

"I'm making sure he's still breathing."

"What do you mean? I thought you said it was healthy."

She opened her mouth to explain but then waved him off with a hand.

"You wouldn't know anything about it. Or care."

Bud, unable to argue with either point, fell back into alcoholic slumber.

Months later, on a hot August night, Bud took leave of his wife and son, as he regularly did these days, and drove into town where an empty bar stool awaited him. He filled a seat surrounded by men from the warehouse where he used to work. Familiar greetings were exchanged, and soon Bud was repeating his litany of complaints about money, the heat, a leak in his boat... life.

"How's the newborn?" a man asked. "I hear he's got your looks, Bud."

Stifled laughter. Ordinarily, such a comment would have earned the man a deadly look from Bud, or perhaps a threat to alter the man's face so that it would be virtually indistinguishable from that of the baby.

"Doesn't cry much," he responded sulkily. "I think he's dumb."

"Well now, Bud, you should feel lucky. Mine won't go half an hour without waking up the whole house. I can hardly keep my eyes open at work. They're gonna fire my ass if I fall asleep at the press one more time."

Bud scowled, reminded that they still had jobs while he did not.

"I don't get anymore sleep than you do," he said. He told them about Pamela getting up at odd hours of the night.

"Ah," one of them said in an understanding tone.

"Ah what?" Bud asked sharply.

"Well, she's worried about SIDS, probably. What, with the abnormality and all."

"Worried about _what?"_

"Well, _SIDS,"_ the man answered. "You know, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I don't think anybody knows what causes it, but a lot of babies die every year. They just...stop breathing, I guess. That right?"

He looked around the group for affirmation.

"Whatever you say, Nurse Betty," another man retorted.

Everyone laughed except Bud, who stared pensively at the remnants of beer foam gathered around the rim of his glass. He watched tiny bubbles popped inaudibly. There was a subtle change in his face as something popped in his mind too.

The men wore the evening with inebriated merriment. Later, Bud rose unsteadily from his chair and excused himself with an acidic belch before heading to the restroom. After urinating for a long time, he flushed and walked to the sink. He did not wash his hands, which were tinted with dirt and the blood and slime of fish and worms. Under the stark fluorescent tube lighting, he looked into a mirror that revealed a face ravished by bad decisions.

What had been the first? Dropping out of high school, of course. He had jilted his education and a promising college football career in order to start a fishing charter company. The day he walked into the bank to ask for a loan, a blue-green algae bloom had spread throughout the lake practically overnight, making it impossible for anyone to a secure a loan for any water-related business venture. And didn't _he_ look like the jackass when the loan officer broke the news to _him, _a lake fisherman. He hadn't known about the pond scum because, well, lately he'd been doing a lot of drinking and not a lot of fishing.

The drinking – that was bad decision number two. That little problem began about the time he dropped out of school. He had been pretty straight-laced up to that point. Then he discovered that partying all night wasn't a problem if you had nowhere to be at eight o'clock the next morning.

Knocking up Pamela had been a real whopper of a bad decision, probably the worst of his life. He first met her the night his friends cajoled him into attending the Homecoming football game, which took place at the same high school that he quit but they still attended. He sat depressed on the bleachers through most of the evening while missed opportunities looped like a bad film in his brain. When the game ended, he and the guys descended to the field to chat with some cheerleaders. Bud had been handsome then, but his failure to make anything of himself had tarnished him. All of the girls overlooked him, except one. She was a junior – not a cheerleader, but the girl who managed the pompons and megaphones and provided the players with paper cups of water. Pamela, a born caretaker, saw something irresistible in Bud's sad eyes. She gave herself to him that night on the beach of the lake.

Abandoning her after she got pregnant was not an option. He stayed not because of any notion that embracing responsibility was the right thing to do. In fact, the possibility never occurred to him that marrying her and fathering their child would finally place him on sound footing after so many missteps in his life. No, he stayed with Pamela because he was scared of her father.

Elias Voorhees was the only man who had ever produced chill fear within Bud. It wasn't just that he was a big, imposing son of a bitch – big and solid like the rock face of a cliff. His eyes were colorless and lifeless, and Bud felt his breath grow shallow when he found himself looking at them for too long. So he never did for fear of drowning in them. Elias also possessed a calm demeanor that unnerved him. It was the calm of black, glassy waters concealing leviathans that roamed just beneath the surface. When Elias was around, Bud felt something hanging in the air between them. Something darker than mere scrutiny. Something like...predation. Yes, it was as if the old man were like a lion, and at any time, if the instinct arose...

So when Elias suggested that Bud marry his daughter to make an honest woman out of her, he did so. And when Elias suggested that Bud find work to support his daughter, he garaged his boat and found work at a warehouse that manufactured custom metal parts. He stopped drinking too. Old Mr. Voorhees never suggested that he stop. He did that on his own. Bud simply couldn't trust himself not to unleash the lion by doing something stupid – by making another bad decision, as he often did when he drank.

Then the baby died. Shortly after that, Elias dropped dead of a heart attack. The two deaths happened in tandem. Bing, bang. Pamela was inconsolable. Bud started drinking again.

As it turned out, Elias had a lot of money held up in land and stocks. His will assigned them to his surviving wife, and when she died, the inheritance was split up between Pamela and some cousins on the West Coast. Hope sprang from within Bud as he recognized the opportunity to become a self-made man and give birth to a life never realized. He pleaded with Pamela to sell off some of the land and stocks – not all of it, but just enough to help him start a fishing charter. Even if she gave him a modest sum, he could supplement it with a small loan from the bank. Fishing charters were a hot thing now, he told her, and with his knowledge of the local aquatic habitat, he could guarantee customers the kind of fishing that all the other half-assed fisherman couldn't.

On this point, however, Pamela was resolute. Any capital gained from the selling of stocks or land would be used to put her children through college.

"And I'm sure you of all people understand how important that is," she added.

Now, finally, a child had been born that had not exited her womb limp and breathless. It had lived. He thought of his future. She would demand that he work again. Most likely, he would have to beg for his old job back and swear never to show up drunk again. He would have to garage his boat. Between eight to twelve hour shifts and helping with the baby, there would be no more time to laze the afternoon away on the water, fishing and drinking and forgetting about haunting concepts like responsibility and poor decision-making.

"No," he said into the mirror. "No, that ain't gonna happen."

His hands slid off the grimy porcelain rim of the sink as he stood full and straight.

"No," he said with a decisiveness that felt good.

He walked out of the restroom, paid his bar tab, and drove home.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

When Bud entered the nursery, Jason was asleep in the crib. The baby was on its back, so silent that Bud wondered if it had died, if he would have to do anything at all. But as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he detected the movement of breathing.

He picked up a small bear, once stiff, now plush after a childhood of tenderness. It had belonged to Pamela when she was young. Turning the bear over in his hands, he traced his fingertip along places where she had repaired old holes with stitching. He returned the animal next to the sleeping infant. At that moment, Jason's eyes opened with abrupt alertness, and an old fear trickled like icy water down Bud's back. The hairs on his forearms rose against the inner sleeves of his jacket. He saw the eyes of Elias Voorhees staring up at him. The image of a great sea monster moving under flat, black water flashed at him in the dark.

It's you, he thought. You never died of a heart attack at all, did you? You came back.

He forced the absurd notion from his brain just as another, equally disturbing one took its place.

Maybe you're not Elias. No, maybe you're not. But you're gonna grow up to be just like your grandpappy.

For the second time that evening, Bud was granted a vision of the future. A boy of twelve, the already the size of a man, bigger and stronger than Bud, staring at him with predatory interest. Jason's eyes would be worse those of Elias Voorhees. They would be worse because with those eyes came that face. A face with a mouth twisted in a perpetual, lopsided grin.

The vision was more than Bud needed. He reached down with both hands and turned the small body over on its stomach. With one hand on its back, he used the other hand to push on the back of the skull, depressing the face into the mattress. Ending its life was no longer the impetus behind his action. He simply could not stand to look at those eyes for a second longer. Or that face.

He had planned to smother it for sixty seconds. The seconds passed too swiftly, keeping pace with the rapid pumping of his heart, and he lost count.

When he felt no resistance from the body, he relaxed his hands and gently rotated it onto its back. It didn't move or breathe again. It's eyes were closed, and he was glad for that.

It was done.

He lay down next to his wife. The calm of finality steadied the staccato beating of his heart. She slept deeply. She had not stirred since he had come home.

Thoughts of justification bloomed like blue-green algae in his mind. At least she'll be able to sleep at nights. At least she'll never have to suffer the humiliation of taking that thing out in public. The whispering, the snickering, the sidelong glances, or worst of all, the fear in people's eyes when they saw that misshapen head, that droopy eye... Fear of a baby. Fear of a child. At least she wouldn't have to be its caretaker.

He had saved it, too, from a life of ridicule. Pamela had always underestimated the cruelty of people. She had never understood it – never bothered to – and therefore would never understand what kind of life awaited it. In that way, she was selfish. But he understood, and he had saved them all.

He would console her in her grief, knowing that she would never want another baby. She had told him so early in the pregnancy. With no children to send to college or inherit wealth, she would be vulnerable to the idea of liquidating some assets so that they could live comfortably together. Was it too late to start a business of his own? Was he too old? He didn't think so. There was still time to fix bad decisions of the past. Once he did that, maybe he wouldn't drink so much anymore. Maybe he, too, could sleep the whole night through.

That night, he did.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Bud awoke to a pain that felt like a steel vice pinching the frontal lobe of his brain. Ordinarily, his morning-after aches and pains were not this bad. They told him that his alcohol consumption last night had been excessive, even for him. He had overindulged. He had to. If he had allowed the slightest chance for sober hesitation, he would not have been able to do what needed to be done.

The room was dark except for thin lasers of sunlight that pierced the routing of the closed blinds. He couldn't tell if Pamela was asleep beside him. It hurt too much to turn his head.

It's morning, he thought, and she hasn't looked in on the baby yet. If she had, she would have managed to rouse him, hysterical. She must have slept all night. That was good. But he wasn't particularly looking forward to the moment when she checked on the baby and realized it had been...that it had died. That like thousands of other babies this year, it had fallen victim to SIDS.

He tried to slide a hand toward her side of the bed. He couldn't move his arms. He couldn't move at all.

You drank too much last night, he told himself. But you had to.

Sounds coming from the hallway. She was out of bed...and humming. Footsteps traversing the hall, entering various rooms. She was up.

Bud listened to the sounds of Pamela performing morning chores. "Waking up the house," she called it when she opened all the blinds, sometimes opening windows when the morning air was cool off the lake. If she was waking up the house, then there was no doubt that she had seen the baby.

Certain possibilities entered Bud's mind for consideration. First, the baby was not dead. He rejected that one immediately. The baby was dead, and remembering the force with which he asphyxiated it, he would be lucky he hadn't fractured its skull. The idea startled him. What if there was evidence of strangulation?

He tempered himself. Don't think about that now.

Another possibility. She had lost her mind. He imagined her wandering the house, passing through great gushes of sunshine while cradling an infant corpse. That must be it. When she realized that the baby was dead, that her last chance for happiness and caretaking had grown stiff and cold, her mind had shattered like a light bulb hitting a concrete floor.

Footsteps approaching now as Pamela entered their bedroom, humming and talking in the same animated, high-pitched voice that she used when she talked to Jason. Bud creaked open an eye to see her form cross the room toward the window. She held a quiet bundle in the crook of her left arm. With the right, she pulled on a string to rotate the blind slats. Morning light seared Bud's brain. He squeezed his eyelids shut. His head was really aching now. He would have to make it stop before he could formulate a plan to deal with the current situation.

"Get me some Asprin," he croaked.

She laughed softly, amused.

"Oh, that won't be necessary."

He tried to open his eyes. It was too bright and painful.

"Let's put you in the swing," Pamela said.

Bud listened to her seat the dead infant in a baby swing near the foot of the bed. He forced his eyes open and focused on the morbid scene. When Pamela stepped away from the front of the swing, Jason was wiggling his arms and legs, and Bud saw that the infant was not dead.

His mouth formed an involuntary "oh" of surprise. He squeezed his eyelids shut, opened them again, as if the baby's gyrations were merely the product of his wavering vision. When he turned his gaze to Pamela, her eyes were leveled at him, and he instantly disliked what he saw there.

"Hon, I need something for my head. Boy, does it hurt," he said. It was just another morning.

"I imagine so," she replied. Soft, amused laughter again. "Well, I think I have something for your head, dear."

He did not like that, either. There was a playful mocking in her tone, and it frightened him. It was out of character. Something was off. The vice squeezed his brain, and he winced. His arms wouldn't obey when he attempted to massage his temples. He tried again, but they refused to budge from his sides.

It suddenly dawned on him that his immobility may not be the result of the worst hangover of his life. He raised his head off the pillow, gritting his teeth against the pain that radiated from his neck.

A cold wave of nausea swept over him as he saw that his limbs were bound. She had tied fishing line around his ankles, then secured it taught to the bed's wrought iron footboard. His hands were similarly secured by the wrists. Two additional lines linked his wrists to the each side of the headboard. Altogether, the four lines restricted the mobility of his hands so that he could neither raise them toward his face nor lower them to his feet. He noticed something else. She had folded towels around his wrists and ankles before tying them with the thin wire. Why? For his comfort?

"Were you in his room last night, Bud?" she asked.

"What?"

"Jason's room. Were you in there last night?"

"No," he said. He was twelve-years-old all over again, pleading with his father that he had not stolen the old man's cigarettes.

"I saw your dirty hand prints on the back of his pajamas. I could practically smell them. You were in his room last night."

"No – I mean, yes. Yes, I forgot that I went in there to check on it – _him. _When I got home. You were out. I mean, you were dead asleep. So I went in to check on him for you."

"It saddens me every time you refer to him as _it," _she said, and she turned sorrowfully toward the baby in the swing.

"Pamela, hon, I don't know what you're thinking, but I haven't done anything. I love you, and I–"

He found the words, forced them out.

"I love Jason. I think we can all be happy together. It's my goddamn drinking. I hate myself for it. I'm going to stop. I swear to you."

She turned back to him. Her expression displayed a profound sadness.

"God took away four of my babies before Jason came. And you want to take him away from me too? I can't allow that. I waited too long for him. Now that I have him, he is all that I will ever need."

She approached the side of bed. On the end table, Bud noticed the carton of clear plastic wrap from the kitchen. She removed the roll from the carton and pulled out a length of wrap.

"What are you going to do?" he asked, but he thought that he knew. "Pamela, please. Let's talk about this. Jesus Christ, I didn't do anything. If I did, I don't remember because I was drunk. I'm telling the truth, I swear."

He was speaking fast. Each word tumbled over the next like dominoes.

Incredibly, she was smiling down at him.

"Please!" he cried.

She pressed the end of extended piece of clear plastic wrap to one side of his head, held it there with one hand. With the other hand feeding out more wrapping, she began to unroll it over his face. Bud tried to stop her with his hands but could elevate them no more than a foot off the bed. He shook his head violently from side to side despite the stiffness in his neck.

"Now, Bud, I can't make this easy for you if you're going to be like that," she chastised.

She gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled his head up off the pillow. Then she brought the roll around his head. Panicked and breathing hard, Bud sucked in the plastic on his face and began to choke. For a moment, he stopped thrashing, and she was wrapping his head quickly. Three times. Four times. Round and round.

Through the ripples and creases, Bud saw his wife take a step back from the bed and observe him while he fought for air, his muscles contracting, his back arching up off the mattress. The plastic over his mouth sucked in and bulged out in rapid squeaks. He tried to break it with his tongue, tried to chew it with his teeth. His eyeballs began to swell and ache. The world beyond the plastic sheathing darkened.

Pamela observed her husband's body convulse one last time and then relax. She waited ten minutes, then cut the fishing line and unwound it from his wrists and ankles. She removed the towels that she had placed as a buffer between the wire and his skin. They had done their job. The skin showed no ligature marks. She unwound the clear plastic wrap from his head and caressed his cheek with a delicate hand.

"Consider this a divorce," she said.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Bud Keller was missing. Pamela Keller, his wife, called the Sheriff's Department expressing concern that something had happened to him. He had gone to a bar the previous night, she said. He came home drunk, told her he was going to collect bait, and drove off towing a trailer with his boat. He never came back.

It did not take long to find Bud's truck, a black Toyota Tacoma, parked at a nearby boat ramp. The trailer was bare, and the immediate assumption was that Bud took his boat on the lake and suffered some kind of accident. According to Pamela, he had been drunk. Men who had been drinking with Bud that night also said that he appeared intoxicated by the time he left the bar.

Two days later, Bud's aluminum boat was discovered half-submerged in shallow water, shrouded by a patch of bobbing cattails. There was a bottle of Jack Daniels, now filled with clear lake water, stashed under the bow with other trash. An opened tackle box spilled its weights, pliers, and knives into the bottom of the boat. Spools of line and various lures had floated away and become tangled up in the weeds. A fishing rod protruded from a rod holder clamped to the gunwale. It was what caught the attention of a fisherman as he trolled by. The line was still baited with chicken liver that had been nibbled down to tendrils of organ hanging off the barbed hook. There was no body.

After police hauled the boat ashore and inspected its contents, they noticed a large crack in the hull which had probably been responsible for sinking it.

A week passed.

Sergeant Tierney of the Sheriff's Department stood on the porch of the Keller residence, a two-story colonial painted white with black trim. It stood far back from the road, the front shaded by trees, the back open to the rising sun and cool air off the lake. He rang the doorbell again.

Tierney was handling the missing person's case. Since there was no evidence of foul play, Terney had never considered Pamela Keller a suspect. What did she have to gain from Bud Keller's disappearance, except ridding her life of a lowlife drunk? Besides, she had stayed with him for almost twenty years. Wanted to start a family with him. It wasn't as though she needed him financially, dead or alive. He had been unemployed, and the life insurance fund he'd accumulated from working at the metal fabrication company amounted to little compared to the assets Pamela possessed in land holdings. No, she had nothing to gain from his death. By all accounts, she had loved him.

The door opened and Pamela Keller appeared slightly winded.

"I'm sorry I didn't answer right away. I was in the middle of changing a diaper."

"May I come in?"

"Please do," she said. "May I get you something some iced tea?"

"Thank you," he said when she brought him a glass.

Tierney sat down on the sofa. Above him, trophy fish were mounted on plaques, their gills distended and mouths agape. Pamela took a chair opposite of him. Next to her, in a baby swing, the infant blew a snot bubble at the cop.

"It looks like he's gotten bigger since I was here last. Am I wrong?" Tierney asked.

"No, you're right," she beamed. "He outgrows his clothes faster than I can buy them. I think he's going to be big like his granddad."

Tierney smiled and shook his head.

"Yup, I remember how it was with David," he spoke of his own son, now a teenager.

Tierney took a sip of his tea. He lowered it to his lap and leaned forward gravely.

"Well, I...I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Pamela. We found Bud's body."

He watched her smile fold.

"This morning, some fishermen snagged their anchor on something at the bottom of the lake. When they brought it up, well..."

He looked down into his glass. The ice quietly melted. Pamela dropped her head and closed her eyes. A clock on the fireplace mantel ticked away seconds. Tierney looked up and continued.

"His friends say that he had complained about a leak in his boat. Did he tell you about that?"

"Yes," she said. It was barely audible.

"Any idea why he'd go out with a leak? In the middle of the night like that?"

She was silent, considering.

"I don't rightly know," she said finally. "Maybe he tried to repair it, but it didn't take. All I know is that he was drunk that night. He didn't have to be drunk to do something like that, I suppose. He was always doing things that don't make much sense to me. Usually just silly things, like painting the trim when there's a storm coming. I guess, in a way, that was part of his charm."

A pause.

"I wonder how true that is," Tierney said. He was frowning at her.

Pamela raised her head to look at him. There was subtle alarm in her expression.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's just that...my wife says the same thing about me. But she doesn't always act like its so charming. At least, she never _looks _charmed when I go out and give the mailbox a fresh coat of paint right before it rains."

She looked at him for a second, then broke into a smile.

"I assure you, Sergeant Tierney, we do find that charming about our men. I don't think I'm supposed to tell you that, though. Trade secret."

Tierney grinned. A few moments passed, then he placed his iced tea on the end table next to the sofa and stood up.

"I guess I'd better go," he said. "I'm very sorry."

"Thank you," she replied.

Their smiles faded together.

"I'll have somebody deliver the boat. Deputy Loney patched it up for you. He's good with that kind of thing."

"I honestly don't know what I'd do with it anymore," Pamela said. "I wouldn't know how to manage it on my own. Bud used to take me out on the water a long time ago. It always made me a little nervous – being so far from solid ground. I much prefer to enjoy the water from the beach."

"I understand. No sense in hauling it back here if it'll just sit till the end of time. If you like, I can put the word out to see if anyone wants it. Loney's keeping an eye on it. Actually, Loney might want it for himself. I think he enjoyed fixing it up."

"Thank you," she said, "and please thank Deputy Loney for his trouble."

"It was no trouble at all."

Tierney said good-bye to Pamela and approached the baby swing. He had meant to pinch the baby's cheek as he bent over it. Looking into its colorless eyes and that strange, lopsided grin, he opted to wave at the infant instead.

Donald "Bud" Keller was laid to rest in a lonely plot near the back of Crystal Lake Cemetery. The service was conducted graveside and under a black canopy because the forecast promised rain.

Seated in a chair before the closed casket, Pamela sobbed quietly as she remembered that she had once loved this man. Once loved him so much that she had given him everything. Lost in remembrance, she did not notice how others present – Bud's family, friends, the pastor, the funeral director – frequently shifted their eyes from the casket to the infant that bounced contently on her knee. When the infant returned their glances, they did not smile. A few prolonged upon its face with something akin to medical curiosity. Most shifted their eyes back to the casket, as if they had been caught looking at something obscene.

The service ended, and the murdered husband was lowered into the hole and buried with the secret of his wrongful death.

In time, Pamela would once again assume her maiden name of Voorhees. Nobody seemed to mind since the name _Voorhees_ had always possessed the cachet of success and good-standing, whereas _Keller_ had not.

Pamela lived on with her Jason, blissfully ignorant of a future pregnant with tragedy and horror.

And Jason grew.


End file.
